The German biogeographer Troll coined the phrase "landscape ecology" in 1939 and defined landscape as “‘the total spatial and visual entity’ of human living space, integrating the geosphere with the biosphere and its noospheric [of knowledge] man-made artifacts.”

I once had dinner there with both Jared Diamond, the Boston-born evolutionary biogeographer and best-selling author, and Yvette Mimieux, the right-wing French-Angeleno blond bombshell actress from the 1960s.

Jared Diamond is a biogeographer and evolutionary psychologist at UCLA, and the author of a sweeping, relentlessly environmentalist account of the reasons for the emergence of the modern West to political and economic predominance, which sold a million copies and won a Pulitzer Prize.